Take Once Daily

Neil Young has said that his new album with his on-again, off-again backing band, Crazy Horse, “Psychedelic Pill” (Warner Bros.), was inspired in part by the journey through the past that he undertook in writing his new memoir, “Waging Heavy Peace.” The book lumbers and rambles through six decades of Young’s life and thoughts, often compellingly. The record does the same.

“Psychedelic Pill” is Young’s longest album, which is saying something. It runs to nearly ninety minutes, and almost a third of it is taken up by the opener, “Driftin’ Back,” which begins as a gentle exercise in folk nostalgia but then blossoms into the thick, loud guitar rock that has characterized Crazy Horse’s output since 1969. The lyrics, which are few and far between, worry that the promises of the nineteen-sixties have been squandered by corporations and technology, and it would be an understatement to say that they are idiosyncratic. At one point, Young notes that he loved Picasso until “a tech giant came along and turned him into wallpaper.” At another point, he resolves to get himself “a hip-hop haircut.”

Though “Driftin’ Back” is sprawling, it’s not exactly unfocussed. Young argues, in that song and elsewhere, that any attempt to flatten or commercialize art work (wallpaper, of course, does both) should be avoided at all costs. Elsewhere on the record, Young trots out “For the Love of Man,” a sentimental manifesto that has existed, in some form, since at least the early eighties; delivers a straightforward narrative of a relationship broken by alcoholism, in “Ramada Inn”; and celebrates Canadian pride in the short, jaunty “Born in Ontario.” Not everything works; the spiky if slight title track appears in two different versions, neither entirely successful, and “She’s Always Dancing” sounds like a half-remembered “Like a Hurricane.”

When the album succeeds, though, it does so on an epic scale. The sixteen-minute-long “Walk Like a Giant” has an eerie whistled hook and a chip on its shoulder that closely resembles the one in “Driftin’ Back”: “Me and some of my friends / We were gonna save the world,” Young sings. “But then the weather changed and the white got stained and it fell apart / And it breaks my heart.” The backing vocals chime in with a rueful reminder: “Think about how close we came.” The last minute dissolves into a collage of clanging percussion, industrial-strength guitars, and wordless harmonies, a fitting microcosm of the power and the sense of community at the core of this protean, exhausting, energizing record. ♦